Against the End: Asceticism and Apocalypse in Don Delillo's End Zone

Against the End: Asceticism and Apocalypse in Don DeLillo's End Zone MARK OSTEEN In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche writes that the ascetic "treats life as a maze in which we must retrace our steps to the point at which we entered or as an error which only a resolute act can correct, and he further insists that we conduct our lives conformably to his ideal."' Many of Don DeLillo's novels portray such characters who attempt to rediscover primal simplicity through strategies of ascetic self-denial. Bucky Wunderlick, narrator and protagonist of DeLillo's 1973 novel Great fones Street, withdraws from the fame and noise of rock-n-roU stardom to a small, silent room in New York City's urban desert; undercover soldier Glen Selvy, in Running Dog (1978), seeks simplification and purity in a mechanizing routine that returns him to his training ground and finally compels him to commit ritual suicide. But White Noise (1985) demonstrates that ascetics are driven by their principles of attenuation towards an obsession with ends as well as origins. Jack Gladney, narrator of White Noise, desires to re-authorize himself, to regain control over his fear of death and annihilation by mastering discourses of authority and re- plotting his life. His exposure to a toxic cloud that represents his own nebulous dread leads him to invent a melodramatic tale in which he figures as both author and hero. In their quest for simplicity, then, DeLillo's obsessives ultimately seek terminality: both their own deaths and narrative closure as a terminal point of their life-tales. These characters thus seek an origin that is also an end: each narrows himself to discover either a life gov- ' Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Geneahgy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956) 25; emphasis his. 143 144 PLL MARK OSTEEN erned by rules that obviate the necessity for thought—an end to complexities of meaning and morality—or an end to life itself. All of them verge on suicide or murder. In these first person novels each protagonist attempts to place himself within a framework that simplifies competing impulses and discourses into a single-line narrative that moves inexorably toward perfect and violent closure. While DeLillo's obsession with these ascetics implies sympathy for their quests, the novels instead offer inde- terminate conclusions in which no character discovers the final solution to his malaise nor the source of the maze. Indeed, these novels finally constitute a thoroughgoing critique of the Arheri- can ascetic ideal as a solution to technological anxiety. Rather than helping them cope with their fears, DeLillo demonstrates that asceticism deflects their life-preserving impulses into a pur- suit of apocalypse.2 DeLillo has stated that obsession is useful to writers because it involves "centering and narrowing down, an intense conver- gence. An obsessed person is an automatic piece of fiction. He has a purity of movement, an integrity. Obsession as a state seems . close to the natural condition of a novelist at work on a book."3 Like authors, DeLillo's ascetics are obsessives who con- trive plots, and plots seem inevitably to proceed toward terminal places, toward end zones. As Gladney states in White Noise, "all plots tend to move deathward."'' Obsession focuses consciousness upon a single goal, and an obsessive, like a novelist at work, trav- els in a straight line towards closure. Thus these novels explore the nature of terminality. But DeLillo's novels repudiate closure; they invariably end by not ending, sometimes circling back to their beginnings, sometimes offering ambiguous epilogues that cast doubt on their apocalyptic denouements, and sometimes simply trailing off indeterminately.^ Thus, DeLillo's novels not only comment upon American asceticism and the related attrac- '^ Michael Oriard has pointed out the ascetic tendency in DeLillo's novels in his article "Don DeLillo's Search for Walden Pond," Critique 20 (1978): 524. But Oriard argues (I think, mistakenly) that DeLillo embraces this simplifying impulse as a solution to his characters' problems. •' Tom LeClair, "An Interview with Don DeLillo," Contemporary Literature 2 (1982): 29. •* Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985) 26; subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. ^ Tom LeClair has observed this tendency of DeLillo's novels to return to their beginnings in his In the Loop: Don DeLitlo and the Sptems Novel (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987). DeLillo's End Zone PLL 145 tion for apocalyptic endings, but also interrogate the value of closure as the terminal point of fictions. An obsessive who por- trays the limitations of obsession and the delusions of asceticism, DeLillo critiques linear plot by offering unresolved, static, or self-undermining narratives. DeLillo's plots, especially their ends, deconstruct the impulse towards apocalyptic closure as a tendency in human consciousness and as features of the narratives through which we order experience. In End Zone the narrator, college football player Gary Hark- ness, retreats in confusion to a tiny college on the Texas desert, obeys the authoritative urgings of his ascetic coach, and flirts with self-annihilation through an obsession with nuclear holocaust. Gary desires an "end zone" of purity in which all complexities of meaning and choice are voided, a simplification of landscape and language to the ultimate purity of nothingness. In this text DeLillo traces the source of our cultural fascination with nuclear apocalypse to the ascetic and religious desire for violent cleansing, for a purification through which we conquer the dread of death, paradoxically, by bringing it about. End Zone charts ways that we turn nuclear apocalypse into a mythic fiction that satisfies our powerful attraction for terminality. The novel implicitly connects our attraction for nuclear holocaust to the related desire for fictional closure. However, End Zone, I will argue, is finally against the end. By revealing the religious and linguistic mutations that underlie the lure of apocalypse, the novel criticizes both the ideology of atomic weapons and the conventional fiction that exploits it. Moreover, by frustrating his readers' desire for novelistic closure DeLillo uses his own fiction as an antidote for that apocalyptic disease. Americana, DeLillo's first novel and the one that immediately precedes End Zone, introduces the relationship between asceticism and apocalypse in the remarks of a secondary character. In this novel, narrator/protagonist David Bell deserts his job at a television network for a geographical and spiritual journey to the source of his desperation. He is accompanied by three other spiritual voyagers seeking either a purified life or, better, the "purest of deaths.''^ One of them reports the words of a Sioux * Don DeLillo, Americana (1971; New York: Penguin, 1989) 50; subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. (This reprint edition follows the pagination of the orig- inal edition.) 146 PLL MARK OSTEEN medicine man named Black Knife. America is, he says, a nation of ascetics. We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space. The ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency. What we really want to do ... is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses . antebellum mansions. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for medita- tion and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature. [Am 126] We want to simplify the landscape—and our experience—by building perfect structures—both architectural and mental ones— in which we all become indistinguishable from one another. This is the ascetic dream: to destroy everything and start over, but now to make everyone perfect, that is, identical. We want to replace the forest with a desert. And the new image of our "ascetic scheme," according to Bell, is "the low motel, neat and clean at ground zero" {Am 220). Deserts and motels: one prefigures the landscape after a nuclear holocaust, and the other reflects the terminal condition of the American ascetic spirit. Again and again DeLillo's ascetics end their tales in one or both of these terminal sites. The desert is harsh, unforgiving—and clean. As a character in DeLillo's novel The Names expresses it, "the desert is a solution. Simple, inevitable. It's like a mathematical solution applied to the affairs of the planet."' Motels represent in DeLillo's novels an almost irresistible urge to create sterile spaces, to destroy history by de- molishing its architectural symbols. Often DeLillo's motels are found in the desert, and thus they do not interrupt its sterility so much as internalize that terminal geography. The blandness of motel rooms betrays the spiritlessness at the heart of this ascetic ideal: first we want to create deserts, and then fill them with rooms that reflect an even graver emptiness. A motel room is an indoor desert; it is another locus of terminality. For DeLillo deserts and motels are fictional end zones, places where plots ' Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982) 294. DeLillo's End Zone PLL 147 end.8 Not surprisingly, then, when Gary Harkness contemplates nuclear war, he does so during long walks into the desert. When he finally plays his nuclear war game, it is in a motel room at the edge of that desert.

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